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The Contractors of Chartres
by John James
A two-volume monograph
on the most famous church in medieval France,
built between the fire of 1194 and the 1220s.
There are only 24 copies left ! |
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1978-81, 578 pages, 802 illustrations, cost $AUD.260, ISBN 0959600531
The most revered and famous cathedral in France, still a holy place,
shrine for pilgrims and a religious centre for much of the world.
It was rebuilt in one enormous effort after a disastrous fire in
1194. Less than thirty years later, with all its magnificent sculpture
and beautiful stained glass, it was completed.
John spent five years there, with his three children, between 1969
and 1974. During that time he researched and measured and photographed
every stone in the building. He discovered a number of remarkable
things which have excited historians ever since, though not everyone
has agreed with his conclusions.
He has written about this in a number of books, some of which are
still available and can be bought directly from him or through any
good bookstore.
The most popular, the Master Masons of Chartres, describes the
detective work of discovering the identity of the master architects
who created Chartres, and something of the sacred and practical
geometry that was used in setting it out.
A later and more scholarly book, the Template-makers of the Paris
Basin, describes what John discovered when he spent four years in
the early 1980s looking for other buildings constructed by the same
men.
Most recently he has begun a nine-volume Illustrated Thesaurus
of the creative years of Gothic Architecture between 1120 and 1250
in the Paris Basin. This is called The Ark of God,
His monograph of the cathedral in two volumes, the Contractors
of Chartres, is still, twenty-five years later, the most detailed
work on the subject.
His most interesting discovery, which brought him invitations to
lecture all over the world, was that;
The cathedral of Chartres was not designed by three architects,
or even five or six: in our sense of the word there were no architects
at all - only building contractors who were led by men deeply trained
in all the subtle aspects of their craft. The evidence shows that
this cathedral was built by large mobile teams of masons who moved
around the countryside from job to job working for as long as the
money lasted. When the funds ran out they would leave the site in
a body, the crews still intact under their master, to find another
project. They were like the circuses of today which roam the country,
settling on one site for their allotted time and then, complete
with their tents and tools, departing for other places.
Imagine a modern building designed successively by Walter Gropius,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and others. Our first
reaction might be to say 'what a mess'. But no: for whenever one
of these strongly individual designers has built an addition to
an older building he has worked with care and sympathy to preserve
what he thought to be the best in the older work. Now imagine how
different each building would be if, say, Wright set out the foundations
and Gropius built the lower walls compared to the other way round.
In the first Wright's intricate sense of geometry would set the
pattern for all the rooms and columns, while Gropius' strong sense
for rectilinear forms would impose on Wright's setout a simple unadorned
silhouette. This simplicity placed over a complex setout would then
condition all future work, and might have produced a most interesting
building.
Nine contracting teams built the bulk of the cathedral, returning
again and again in a disorderly and little supervised annual sequence
for over thirty years.
JOHN JAMES writes:
The years spent at Chartres were a magical time for me, reflected
in the quotation from a Pawnee shaman I used at the start of the
book:
"Approach with song everything we meet."
My major discoveries at Chartres have not been refuted over the
past twenty years, but have at times been lost sight of behind disagreements
over my conclusions. To set the record straight, the discoveries
I made include:-
Techniques for analyzing ashlar stonework that I call Toichology.
["The Contractors of Chartres", The Architectural Association
Quarterly, iv 1972, 42-53 and Chartres - les constructeurs, 1978-1984]
With this I could detail the construction sequence of the cathedral
showing it was built in tilted layers that were a bit higher in
the west than in the east. This was illustrated in 32 isometric
drawings. FROM THIS IT FOLLOWED:
Firstly, that the nave and the choir were built at the same time,
not one after the other, and therefore I had to seek some other
explanation for the differences in the windows, flyers and the triforium.
Secondly, the documents for the fire and the vaults provided fairly
accurate dates for each phase of the work. from which the date for
each section of the cathedral, including the portals and their sculpture,
could be inferred.
Thirdly, all six transept portals and their porches were erected
at the same time, and were not cut through existing walls nor added
later. The sculpture for five portals was completed before 1208,
for the porches, the south was finished by 1205 and the north by
1218. Therefore the apogee of Gothic sculpture must be dated to
the reign of Phillipe Auguste, and not Saint Louis.
Fourthly, the sculpture of the Royal Portal was carved and erected
at the same time as the south tower without having been moved from
another location, and therefore its design had been changed while
it was being built. ["An examination of some anomalies in the
ascension and incarnation portals of Chartres Cathedral", Gesta,
1986].
Among a large number of minor findings I mention (for the sake
of those historians who have suggested otherwise) that there is
no evidence for adding the transepts nor for pulling down the western
towers after the 1194 fire, nor for moving the western rose. En
delit shafts were used under the high vaults. The upper "suicide"
doors from the apsidal stairs were for the builders and not the
clergy. The first plan was for a single ambulatory with seven deep
chapels flanked by two rectangular ones at the ends of the aisles
and was changed by a later architect just like Saint-Denis. The
bent axis was deliberate from the beginning. There is no construction
break at any level of the fifth bay of the nave that could justify
the theory that the western towers and the Royal Portal were to
be demolished just 30 years after they had been completed. I have
suggested that the explanation for the smaller bays lies in geometry.
My explanations for the design changes and other anomalies are
still questioned by some. None of us really understand the full
complexities of the period, and when I wrote The Contractors I was
at times too dogmatic about some my interpretations. We do get wiser
with time, and I have adjusted some views in later publications.
I recognize that many people other than the master could have influenced
design decisions, not least the client, visiting masters or the
workmen themselves. I also am aware that a master would seldom have
been as consistent as I first supposed. Nevertheless, the work of
the past twenty-five years still convinces me of the following:-
1. That the masters in charge of the works came and went in nearly
every Early Gothic building in the Paris Basin, including works
under royal patronage like Saint-Denis and la Sainte-Chapelle. ["Multiple
contracting in the Saint-Denis chevet", Gesta, 1993 and The
Template-Makers.]
2. That each master used his own geometry and foot measure to lay
out the templates. Geometry usually included a system of verification
that matched (and may have pre-dated) the procedures of Scholastic
philosophy. ["Discrepancies in medieval architecture: careless
or deliberate?" Architectural Association Quarterly, 1982;
"Chartres cathedral and the rule of geometry", Proceedings
of the sixth New Norcia Humanities symposium, Perth, 1990.]
3. That a newly appointed master in making templates with his own
geometric procedures inevitably altered the building. Also, he could
make design changes that altered, or even canceled, proposals begun
by his predecessors.
4. That these design decisions, the geometry used and, most importantly,
the technical ways of building, can be used to identify the master
in charge. Since the masters worked on many sites in a lifetime,
each would have left a recognizable dossier in many places. [Chapters
8 and 9 in The Template-Makers]. To locate and identify their individual
contributions is a profoundly moving experience - and I have already
published material on the master Olive who created tracery at Essômes
and Reims, and Scarlet who set out the abbey of Longpont and the
roses at Mantes and Laon. ["The Canopy of Paradise", Studies
in Cistercian Architecture, 1984]. Following this trail led to four
years in a camper van doing a survey of all the churches of the
Paris Basin.
5. My cash flow analysis in "What price the cathedrals?",
Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, xix 1972, 47-66 has
been expanded to cover the whole of the Paris Basin, "Funding
the Early Gothic churches of the Paris Basin”, Parergon, XV
1997, 41-82.
Historians of medieval architecture attract less funding and less
jobs than they did twenty years ago, and fewer publishing. Is it
indicative that less sessions are devoted to architecture at Kalamazoo
than there were? Virtually none in 2002! What has gone wrong that
some of the greatest monuments created by man attract so much less
attention than Trojan archaeology, quarks or black holes? Is it
time to revitalize our profession so it will be more fascinating
to educated people? Doing that would increase jobs, grants and popular
appreciation.
I have made suggestions for this, and am at the moment incorporating
them into The Ark of God, 1. Identify the major innovators of the
period to bring a greater sense of life and individuality to our
period. It is thrilling to discover these men and to discern each
step in their creative process, as in the invention of tracery.
This opens a prospect that I find most exciting:- to clothe a previously
anonymous period with an individual variety, and to catch a glimpse,
however brief, into the actual process of creation.
2. Also identify some of the carvers. Its time to integrate recent
work by Stoddard and Watson to see whether the location of the carvers
they have identified coincides with the construction breaks in the
doorways [Stoddard, Sculptors of the west portals of Chartres cathedral,
New York, 1987 and Watson, The structural principles of the Head
Master of Chartres Cathedral, dissertation University of North Carolina,
1986.]
3. The carvers of foliate capitals are much easier to identify than
sculptors. Knowing them would help us understand their movements,
employment patterns and, through changes in their style, the chronology
of the pieces they carved. From this we should be able to date nearly
every part of most buildings, and to follow the travels of some
very gifted men ["Chapiteaux à feuilles d'acanthe du
Portail Royal", Bulletin de la société archéologique
d'Eure-et-Loir, 1990.]
4. Examine their geometric methods to understand how they designed
these great undertakings. As a practicing architect I found this
study the most powerful tool for getting closer to their way of
working, but my colleagues' almost total disinterest in geometry
has discouraged me. I still believe it is an important tool, and
would like to interest others in it.
5. Scientific analysis of timber, mortar and stone, as in recent
dendro-chronology of the aisle timbers at Chartres which confirmed
my dating, and recent exciting work on stone sourcing.
6. Use Toichology. Without understanding the church in 3-D and being
able, either on paper or in the mind, to visualize the building
evolving in space and time, it is extremely difficult to comprehend
the process of architectural construction. It would be useful if
courses in stone-reading was included in the training of all architectural
historians.
7. Recast the general history of Early Gothic with everybody's work
of the past twenty years. So many outmoded beliefs are still being
repeated that this may be a good time to update an overview of this
unique period. [for example. see chapter 2, The Traveler's Key to
the Sacred Architecture of Medieval France, New York, 1986.]
From my own experience in lecturing and grant-raising I believe
that studies that identified real people would engender considerable
excitement, that more people would become interested in our work,
and more students would want to enroll in our courses. This is not
being mercenary, but realistic about the future growth of our discipline.
Southern Hemisphere Distributor: West Grinstead Publications -
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OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAMES
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